A Hope in the Unseen: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Cedric has arrived at Slater Junior High, a long bus ride from the Brown campus into a working-class neighborhood of Providence. He is conducting his research for the Fieldwork and Seminar in High School Education course, and will be attending the school two days per week for the entire semester. While he knows that he is supposed to take on the role of the dispassionate observer at the school, Cedric feels right at home. He meets Mr. Fleming, the eighth-grade math teacher, who Cedric thinks treats the students a little too harshly.

After the class is over, the students crowd around Cedric and ask him about Brown. They have never heard of anyone attending Brown, despite the fact that it is just across town. Mr. Fleming talks to Cedric privately after the class is over, and tells him that he knows which students will die when they leave the school. This sends Cedric into a tailspin of emotions, and makes him like Mr. Fleming even less for his judgmental comments and behavior. He leaves thinking about punching the teacher in the face.

Meanwhile, Barbara is talking to one of the middle managers at work about Cedric, and when she tells the man that her son is at Brown University, he expresses surprise and asks if he has an athletic scholarship. He is from India, and has boasted about his daughter for years, but for as smart as he has made her out to be, she is at the University of Maryland, which is not nearly as good of a school as Brown. Barbara responds that Ivy League colleges do not give out athletic scholarships, and that her son is there for academics.

Barbara chats with her other coworkers—black women like herself—about the possibility of a slave museum. The women joke that their office is a slave museum, not only because the building once housed slave quarters, but because it is a place where black women cast aside their ambition and work in administrative positions for the majority of their lives. She thinks about how things have changed with Cedric, how she tries to offer him advice about trusting in God, but she is not sure he is listening to her, and sometimes wonders if he has any reason to. One of her few joys in life at this point is her shoe collection, though she sometimes feels uncomfortable when her fellow parishioners at Scripture Cathedral compliment her, as material wealth can be a touchy subject in church.

When Barbara gets home from church, she finds a Notice of Eviction in her pile of mail. She knows that this has been coming, and she even attended a Housing Court hearing in which her landlord explained that she was three months behind on her rent. Rather than explain where her meager salary went during that time, she simply promised that she would get back on track, and was ordered to double-pay her rent for the next two months to make up for it. But she did not pay, and the eviction notice has come again. She thinks about the shoes she has been able to buy with the extra money that has not gone toward her rent, and the other bills that she has been able to pay on time. She thinks about how getting her back rent is a test from God, and then goes to sleep.

Back at Brown, there has been a positive change in the relationship between Cedric and Rob since they returned from break. One night, with the lights off, they talked about their lives, and Cedric opened up to Rob, while his roommate asked questions and really tried to understand what Cedric’s life must have been like. They agree that the conversation was good, and that they should have had it much earlier in the year. This morning, they go to breakfast together, and Rob tells Cedric about a “wall of shame” that lists black male students who engage in interracial dating, and how it is unfair to shame black people in that way. Cedric appreciates Rob’s outrage at this topic, and the fact that they are talking about race at all.

Cedric has been estranged from Zayd, who had become more or less his best friend, since they had a fight in January and went their separate ways. This makes Cedric feel strangely lonely, as now is the time when students begin to establish their groups of friends and thus their identities. Many of the students on campus are part of groups, like the feminists or the LGBTQ Alliance. Cedric is beginning to feel more open minded about homosexuality, which had seemed very shocking to him when he first arrived. He has met a number of students, like one of the peer counselors for his unit, who are gay or bisexual, and aren’t bad people at all. There are also the racial and ethnic groups that attract Brown students, including the Latin American Students Association, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and of course Harambee House, the all-black dorm.

Cedric wanders down to Café Paragon, where Rob and his friends are celebrating Rob’s 19th birthday. Cedric realizes that he needs to overcome his tendency to shut himself off from other people, and that is his biggest challenge. At the café, he engages in friendly conversation with the people he knows from his unit, and feels energized by the experience. When some of the students pull out their driver’s licenses and fake IDs to order beer, Cedric decides that it is time to go, because he does not have a driver’s license and has no interest in drinking beer.

In Larry Wakefield’s education class, the students are arguing about the midterm paper, suggesting that they should have the opportunity to do something more creative, like a play or a poem, rather than an analytical essay. He reminds the students that they are at Brown to develop their writing and analytical skills, but Cedric comments that he feels so angry and passionate about what he has seen at the school, that he will have a hard time being intellectual about it. A few weeks later, Wakefield reads Cedric’s assignment, which is a two-page poem. Wakefield is intrigued and also horrified, wondering how Cedric made his way into Brown with this kind of work.

In class, Wakefield passes out the midterms and Cedric’s does not have a grade on it. He asks Cedric to come to his office to discuss it. The professor has spent a lot of time thinking about what to do about Cedric’s poem, and it makes him rethink his entire career in education. When Cedric arrives in his office, Wakefield tells him that he loved the poem and was moved by it, but that Cedric also needs to work on his analytical skills, and find some distance from the topic he is studying. He gives Cedric a B on the assignment, but makes him promise to write a more traditional research paper for the final. He finishes with advice to gain some distance from all that he has been through, and to put away some of the anger that he feels, in order to see the work from an academic perspective.